James Lloyd Greenfield, an agile and urbane dark-haired man of forty-three, cared a great deal about how he looked and about the impression he was making on each new person that he met. He remembered names, was always attentive, was often complimentary. His suits were well tailored and of excellent fabric, usually set off by a colorful shirt and a silk handkerchief sprouting from his breast pocket. He revealed a sense of humor through an easy Midwestern accent, and he reminded one somehow of the successful executives shown in the television commercials, the wellgroomed youthful men being served martinis by blond stewardesses in the friendly skies of United; which is to say that there was nothing carelessly arranged about Jim Greenfield, that his taste was contemporary, that he symbolized the sort that large organizations were proud to display in public—men who did not quite get to the very top but who were often more presentable than those who did. Greenfield had worked hard to get to where he was, however, and the emphasis on his manner and appearance is not to demean his character but merely to suggest that he had cultivated what a more uncaring man, a presumptuous or ruthless man, might have been unlikely to cultivate. James Greenfield liked people, wanted to be liked in turn, and he was.
He had been born in Cleveland, the son of a job-printer and a former regular army sergeant, and his home life had been unhappy, particularly with regard to his father. Forced to shift for himself at an early age, working at fourteen in the office of the Cleveland Press, living with friends or relatives, Greenfield prematurely developed an adaptability to new people and places. He obtained a scholarship to Harvard, earning extra money by working in the university’s news bureau. After his graduation in 1949 he joined the Voice of America, serving in New York and in the Far East. During the Korean War he became a correspondent for Time, remaining in the Time organization for ten years, moving from Tokyo to New Delhi, from London to Washington, acquiring a taste for the better life through a liberal expense account, meeting people around the world who would be his friends for years. One person whom he met in India, in 1955, was The Times’ correspondent Abe Rosenthal. They were immediately companionable, and they sometimes traveled together on assignments through India and once into Ceylon.
When they were both transferred to bureaus in Europe—Greenfield to London, Rosenthal to Warsaw—they and their wives continued to remain in touch. In 1962, after Greenfield had spent a year in Washington as the chief diplomatic correspondent of the Time-Life bureau, he resigned to join the State Department as a public-affairs official. When Rosenthal visited Washington, he saw Greenfield; when Greenfield was in New York, he saw Rosenthal, and through Rosenthal he came to know Clifton Daniel, Arthur Gelb, and Punch and Carol Sulzberger.
James Greenfield left the State Department in 1965 to work with Pierre Salinger in Los Angeles as an executive with Continental Airlines, but this, he soon discovered, was not really what he wanted to do. He hoped to return to journalism, and during a business trip to New York, having lunch one day with Rosenthal at Sardi’s, Rosenthal mentioned the possibility of Greenfield’s joining The Times. When Greenfield expressed interest, Rosenthal discussed it with Daniel. In June of 1967, Greenfield came to New York as an assistant metropolitan editor under Arthur Gelb. Gelb had at least a half-dozen assistant editors on the local staff, and it was several days before a desk for Greenfield could be wedged into the tight fleet of gray metal that surrounded Gelb near the front of the room behind the silver microphone; but it was finally managed after the upanchoring and rearranging of a few other desks, and Greenfield’s own graceful manner facilitated his entry. He did not appear to be jockeying for position among his peers, but rather he conversed with them and with the staff in a casual, pleasant way; and when he began to make suggestions, after a few weeks, he did so with delicacy and tact.
Rosenthal did not know specifically where Greenfield might best serve the paper, but he gradually came to regard him as perhaps the most imaginative subordinate editor in the newsroom, an idea man in ways quite different from Gelb. Gelb’s ideas were largely attuned to the cultural or social life of New York City, while Greenfield’s interests encompassed the nation and overseas; and not only those countries in which he had lived, but others to which he had been drawn by his journalist’s curiosity. Greenfield was very well informed about the student protest movement in America, a problem that he had studied during his years in the State Department; after he had left Washington for the airlines job in Los Angeles, he had continued to remain intimately interested in the thinking on campuses and in such hippie centers as Haight-Ashbury, which he had personally visited. He knew about the latest fads, the philosophies, and the language of the young, and he was one of the first Times editors to perceive the hippie movement as national in scope, spreading from San Francisco to Madison Avenue, and he encouraged the wider coverage of teen-age preoccupations.
Greenfield’s personal knowledge of the inner workings of Washington was regarded as a significant asset by some senior editors in New York. He provided them with a check against Wicker’s bureaumen. Greenfield had many contacts within the government and among those departed New Frontiersmen who hoped to regain power someday behind Senator Robert F. Kennedy; from these and other sources, Greenfield often received tips on matters that the Johnson loyalists were not anxious to discuss. If this information was not always substantial enough to produce major stories, it often added to the dimension or understanding of the news that was available. When the American ship Pueblo was captured by the North Koreans, Greenfield obtained information that described some of the drama and the scurrying on deck just before the ship’s radio went silent and the crew was captured—the sort of detail that New York had long claimed it was not getting out of Washington. But at this time there was no plan to move Greenfield from his present position to Washington. Greenfield was to remain in New York for an indefinite period, and his first important assignment was to help in the production of the experimental afternoon newspaper that Punch Sulzberger had been contemplating ever since the disappearance of the World Journal Tribune.
Sulzberger was not the only publisher interested in the afternoon newspaper market in New York; the owners of the New York Daily News were also exploring the possibilities, as was the publisher of New York’s Spanish-language El Diario—La Prensa, although these men, like Sulzberger, were extremely secretive about their projects. The only thing known about The Times’ venture was that it would be six columns wide and would somewhat resemble the Observer in London. Rosenthal was put in charge of a twelveman committee to supervise the first edition; he was assisted by a bullpen editor named Lawrence Hauck, by Arthur Gelb and James Greenfield, by numbers of other deskmen, makeup men, and reporters, all assembled in a temporary newsroom on the eleventh floor behind locked doors and windows that were covered to prevent outside peeping. There the plans were made for columns, features, and the entire news format, while outside the building representatives of the advertising and circulation departments conducted surveys to estimate the income such a newspaper might expect in New York.
After weeks of work and careful planning by Rosenthal, a dummy edition was laid out and was printed in the subbasement of the Times building at 5:30 one morning. Guards protected the stack of freshly printed forty-page papers from the random perusal or theft by outsiders. Then later in the day the papers were delivered to the office of the vice-president, Ivan Veit, where forty-five copies were numbered and distributed to a select list of executives through the building. A few days later all the copies were recalled, but one was missing. Tom Mullaney, editor of the Financial-Business department, had locked his copy in his desk drawer before leaving the building for the weekend; when he returned on Monday he discovered that his drawer had been jimmied; his copy was gone.
The response to the pilot paper, and to a second sample, was mixed—some executives liked it, some did not, some wavered and waited, others who had originally opposed the idea continued to oppose it, asserting that a second newspaper would adversely affect The Times. Sulzberger had initially been excited by the project, but the more he thought about it, the more reluctant he became. A second newspaper would require the creation of a philosophy that was different from The Times’, but was not inconsistent with it. There was also the problem of housing a second staff when The Times was having difficulty in fitting its present staff into the building, and there was the question of whether there was sufficient advertising revenue to support a new paper at a time when production and labor costs were higher than ever. Finally, there was doubt in Sulzberger’s mind that he and the other top executives could divide their energies without jeopardizing The Times; and so he announced that he was suspending the afternoon operation. Since the other New York publishers had come to the same decision, the city was left for the time being with only one afternoon newspaper, the New York Post.
Rosenthal was very disappointed by Sulzberger’s conclusion. Rosenthal had been very enthusiastic and optimistic about the new enterprise, and it had also represented his first major undertaking since he had become an assistant managing editor, and now he interpreted its rejection as a failure on his part. The other executives did not feel this way, at least did not express it; indeed, the afternoon editions had been so closely guarded that relatively few Timesmen were aware of Rosenthal’s involvement and hopes. Nevertheless, he was upset—his smooth, quick climb had been interrupted, and Sulzberger’s decision had hit him almost simultaneously with another aggravating bit of news. A book that he had coauthored with Gelb, a lengthy study of Daniel Burros, the Jewish Nazi who had committed suicide after reading McCandlish Phillips’ article, had been unenthusiastically reviewed in certain periodicals, including The Times’ own Sunday “Book Review.” Almost as disconcerting as the review was The Times’ choice of the reviewer—Nat Hentoff, a novelist and critic who had previously written disparagingly in the Village Voice about Rosenthal’s editorship of the New York staff. The Voice, in fact, had sharpened its sights on The Times with Rosenthal’s rise, or so it seemed to him, carping at such Times exclusives as the Harlem “Blood Brothers” story, and once printing in the Voice an anonymous article by a former Timesman who blamed Rosenthal for the low morale in the newsroom and other changes for the worse.
Why the Times “Book Review” would send the Rosenthal-Gelb book, entitled One More Victim, to anyone on the Voice was both mystifying and infuriating to Rosenthal and Gelb, and they could not help but wonder if it had been done out of spite by some subordinate editor on the eighth floor with a malicious sense of humor. If such were the case, a book editor could rather easily fulfill his intentions: knowing his stable of reviewers, knowing their literary leanings and vanities and pet grievances, their tendencies when dealing with certain authors or subjects or political philosophies, the editor had merely to match a particular book with a particular reviewer to get an almost certain result. This game of literary crossbreeding for invidious ends was not so possible on the lower levels of the Sunday “Book Review” when Markel had been the high potentate: in those days an effort had been made to shepherd the books of important Timesmen, or books by friends of The Times, into the hands of genial reviewers. But now the Times “Book Review,” no doubt tired of its bland old image under Markel and also following the more rapier style of The New York Review of Books, was trying to forge a sharper product. John Simon, known as “Bad John Simon” in New York cultural circles, was back writing for The Times, his dispute with Markel a forgotten issue. The Times had recently published a number of reviews that had drawn protests from readers claiming that the critics’ well-known political positions and prejudices precluded any chance of a fair review (e.g., Sidney Hook’s review of Dr. Meyer Zeligs’ Friendship and Fratricide: An Analysis of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss). And The Times was also publishing critiques that seemed more unjustifiedly venomous than any in the past (e.g., Wilfrid Sheed’s assault on William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner).
With regard to the Rosenthal-Gelb book, the assignment to Hentoff had been made by a bright young iconoclast who had recently joined the “Review”—a man who read the Voice and who, in the absence of Francis Brown, head of the department, had sent the book to Hentoff with an awareness that the review might produce a bit of flack. Although no sanctions were levied against the impolitic editor, it was a fairly good bet that, among the 6,354 employees of The Times, his future was not now the brightest; nor would his erudition and literary judgment henceforth be considered so trustworthy as, for example, that of Eliot Fremont-Smith, the daily critic, who had written favorably about One More Victim.
Fremont-Smith, a neat and tweedy man of thirty-eight, had come a long way from his own days as a book critic for the Village Voice. A graduate of Antioch, with graduate work at Columbia and Yale, he had started out on The Times in the Sunday “Book Review” but had moved to the position of daily book critic in 1965, assuming the role of chief literary tastemaker that had been the function of Orville Prescott. It is remarkable on The Times how the title makes the man, and how the deprivation of that title suddenly does the opposite: Orville Prescott for years had been the terror of the book industry, an arbiter whose every approving nod could supposedly sell a thousand books; and yet when Prescott was replaced as the principal critic by Fremont-Smith, and although Prescott in semiretirement continued to review books in The Times and elsewhere, there was suddenly no longer fear nor felicity over the pronouncements of Prescott. However, Fremont-Smith, upon inheriting the mantle, soared to oracular heights; his words were reprinted in publishers’ ads, he was the brahmin of Brentano’s, the literary guide to ladies in Great Neck. Like his predecessor, he received more attention and earned more money from writing about other people’s books than he probably could have from his own. Worse, he might never know if he could write his own. A critic spends his best years reading other men’s words in quiet rooms, refining his own taste, making greater demands on his contemporaries, and most critics have neither the time, nor perhaps the nerve, to be tested themselves—their taste is possibly too good for their own good. The critic also knows that as a critic he has made enemies, and should he venture forth with a book of his own, they will be waiting in the wings to see that he gets his due.
So it is a rather vexatious life for the Times critic who writes well and who nurtures secret ambitions to gamble on his talent. His choice is to step down from his pedestal and risk being at the mercy of such men as he had been, or to try to play it safe within the House of Ochs, hoping that he will not be adversely affected by executive changes and will not lose touch with contemporary taste in literature, as it appeared that Prescott had done in his final years. Prescott had become a white-haired gentleman who fancied the traditional and who seemed offended by the literary outcroppings and droppings of the mid-Sixties, and this had hastened the appearance of his successor. Bright-eyed, sharp, engagé, an astute individual who knew better than to send a Timesman’s book to Nat Hentoff, Eliot Fremont-Smith was the sort of modern critic that Clifton Daniel wanted—a versatile journalist who could write an interesting and intelligent review, could carve with the best, and could parry and tiptoe when a situation seemed ticklish, as perhaps it was when the book by Svetlana Alliluyeva had been scheduled for review. Fremont-Smith had handled it well, not dismissing the work as a nonbook that had been trumpeted in the West for its propaganda value, but rather rhapsodizing the fact that Stalin’s daughter was indeed alive and safely on American shores. In another column, reviewing The News Media by John Hohenberg, Fremont-Smith managed to work in the opinion that while criticism of the press was desirable, and while influential criticism was lacking, the particular brand of press coverage exhibited in the Village Voice was not the answer. The Voice, he wrote, “appears increasingly to have its own personal and political ax to grind, and is probably counter-influential”—a sentence that did him no harm with the front office.
As the emergence of Fremont-Smith had caused Times readers to forget Orville Prescott, so did the new theater critic, Clive Barnes, make readers forget Stanley Kauffmann and, to a degree, even Walter Kerr. Shortly after Kerr had replaced Kauffmann as the daily drama critic, and after the disappearance of the World Journal Tribune, there was great concern both on Broadway and within The Times about the excessive power of The Times’ single critic; and it was Kerr who suggested that the paper have two drama critics—one who would review plays for the daily edition, the other who would write a roundup every week for the Sunday drama page. Kerr, wishing to take a longer view of the theater, volunteered for the Sunday assignment, and he was replaced on the daily beat by Clive Barnes, a short, bouncy Englishman of thirty-nine who, though primarily a dance critic for seventeen years, was very knowledgeable about the theater. Barnes was also sufficiently energetic to handle both ballet and drama criticism; he had insisted, in fact, that he be allowed to retain his position as a ballet critic, dance being his overwhelming passion, and he contemplated a schedule whereby he would attend most Broadway first nights and ballet second nights, altering the routine on occasions by attending, as Stanley Kauffmann had done, the final Broadway previews.
It was somehow hoped that the combination of Barnes and Kerr would split the power of the drama chair and provide readers with a divergent view of the theater. But the new arrangement did nothing of the sort—it merely shifted the daily spotlight away from Walter Kerr to Clive Barnes. Kerr’s weekend reviews sometimes appeared a week or ten days after an opening, and they lacked the immediacy of Barnes’ quick appraisals. No matter what Kerr wrote in his weekend column, the verdict was in, The Times had spoken. Another reason that the focus had shifted to Barnes was his more lively and lucid prose style. Since leaving the Herald Tribune for The Times, Kerr’s style seemed to have lost some of its edge and vivacity; it was as if, in coming to The Times, he had been affected by the increased power, the awesome responsibility; the weight of the institution seemed to be pressing upon him. Clive Barnes, however, had not worked in the shadow of the Times building for years; had, in fact, known very little about The New York Times when it had first sought to hire him in London. Barnes had occasionally seen copies of the paper on London newsstands and in the offices of British publications, but what he had seen was the slim, unimpressive overseas edition, and he had not become aware of The Times’ full influence until he arrived in New York.
Nevertheless, being a man who took neither himself nor his surroundings too seriously, Barnes continued to do what he had done before, which was to write about a great many things at great speed, pounding a typewriter with two tireless fingers, relying on his instinctive judgments. And his style had an instant freshness; his intellectuality seemed brilliantly dashed off and not intended to be ex cathedra. Barnes was witty and clever, and this helped him in his delicate task on The Times: instead of condemning a play in an exacting manner, as Kauffmann might have done, Barnes was capable of treading lightly, of adroitly conveying two things at once, of sometimes both praising and criticizing a production in a single sentence, thus preserving his own integrity and perhaps a bit of the box office. In reviewing the Broadway production of Joseph Heller’s We Bombed in New Haven, Barnes wrote:
If I was forced to a judgment I would call it a bad play any good playwright should be proud to have written, and any good audience fascinated to see.
In Barnes’ appraisal of two of Harold Pinter’s short plays, “Tea Party” and “The Basement,” he wrote:
To some extent—and please do not let me put you off from going, for these plays are exquisitely exciting—these are minor Pinter. But Pinter is one of the most important English-speaking playwrights since O’Neill, and minor Pinter is better than major almost anyone else.
There was also working in The Times’ Cultural-News department at this time another critic who was gaining wide attention—a dark-eyed, dark-haired, determinedly dowdy young woman of twenty-nine named Renata Adler. Born in Milan of American parents, a graduate of Bryn Mawr, Miss Adler had attended the Sorbonne and had received a master’s degree in comparative literature at Harvard. Prior to her joining The Times as its film critic in November of 1967, she had spent five years on the staff of The New Yorker, writing on a variety of subjects—the clamorous existence of New York disc jockeys, the Civil Rights march in Alabama, a New Left convention in Chicago; “Talk” pieces, and occasional reviews on films and books, the most memorable of which was a merciless vivisection of the work of novelist Herbert Gold. That Gold could have continued to be a productive writer after that review was an indication of rare resolve on his part; and that Miss Adler, who in person seems so disarmingly sympathetic and tentative, could have written the review was a revelation of another sort.
Miss Adler’s work in The New Yorker had attracted the attention of Clifton Daniel, Harrison Salisbury, and other editors, but they had been unable to interest her in joining The Times until they had offered her the position of film critic, replacing Bosley Crowther, who had held the job for twenty-seven years. Crowther was still in fine health at sixty-three, but the editors believed that contemporary films required a more youthful observer, and thus Renata Adler was hired and Crowther was named a critic-emeritus. Emeritus is a gloomy word at The Times, and within a year he had retired from the paper to become an executive consultant for Columbia Pictures.
Miss Adler quickly became, as Crowther had been in his final months, a very controversial critic: Crowther’s protest mail had largely concerned his failure to appreciate the symbolic significance of the casual mayhem in Bonnie and Clyde, while Miss Adler was regarded in the entertainment industry as priggish and passionless about films. According to Variety, she was happy with only two of the first twenty-seven films she reviewed (Charlie Bubbles and The Two of Us); she had reservations about such widely acclaimed productions as The Graduate and In Cold Blood, and one producer spent $6,000 for a full-page ad in The Times to question her taste after she had panned one of his films. The ad strongly implied that she did not really like films, a contention that she denied to a reporter from Newsweek: “I like movies and I like bad movies but that doesn’t mean I have to say they’re good.”
The reaction to her criticism, however, seemed to upset her in the beginning, and when a free-lance writer sought her cooperation to do a personality profile on her for a magazine, she pleaded that the idea be postponed, explaining that she would probably be fired in the near future. But the editors at this point had no such intentions. While recognizing her considerable influence over moviegoers, particularly in the foreign or art-house market, she did not have, like Barnes, the power to make or break a production, and The Times’ editors were also in agreement that Miss Adler wrote very well and entertainingly about subjects that often failed to entertain. In reviewing a United Artists release, The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz, in January of 1968, she wrote:
Even if your idea of a good time is to watch a lot of middle-aged Germans, some of them very fat, all reddening, grimacing, perspiring, and falling over Elke Sommer, I think you ought to skip “The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz,” because this first film of the year is so unrelievedly awful in such a number of uninteresting ways … [it] is a bit of bumbling, color pornography, a little nude film that lost its way on 42d Street and drifted on over to the Astor.
So Renata Adler passed her trial period at The Times and became the latest in a line of young journalists bringing sophistication into the news columns of The Times, fulfilling one of Daniel’s aims as the managing editor.
As Clifton Daniel began his fourth year in that position, he could properly take pride not only in the more lively coverage of the arts, and, of course, society, but also in the better reportage emanating from other special departments. The decision to appoint Robert Lipsyte as a sports columnist, alternating with Arthur Daley, had brought a smooth literary touch to sports writing that had been missing in New York’s morning newspapers since the disappearance of the Herald Tribune and Red Smith. Daniel had also played a role in The Times’ better obituary writing, having assigned a dedicated specialist named Alden Whitman to that task. Fred M. Hechinger, installed as head of the Education-News department, had succeeded after other men in that position had not. Tom Mullaney had run the Financial-Business department admirably since the retirement of Jack Forrest a few years before; and the department that decides which wedding and engagement pictures will appear in The Times was under the capable jurisdiction of a status-conscious, unbribable man named Russell Edwards.
The foreign, national, and local staffs were clearly under the authority of New York, and Daniel seemed more self-assured now than he had in several months. The ungraceful dismissal of Kauffmann, a disturbing experience for Daniel, had been superseded by the success of Daniel’s discovery, Clive Barnes.
Corporate life had seemed better for Daniel, in fact, since the triumphant return of his friend Salisbury from Hanoi in January of 1967; and while Daniel’s relationship with Punch Sulzberger was not as warm as both men might have hoped, they had gotten along reasonably well through 1967, and with the arrival of 1968, Daniel was fairly certain of his place in the hierarchy. Catledge was still lingering in the background, but the executive editor had done considerable traveling of late, and one Times reporter who had visited New Orleans had brought back word that Catledge was building a home there. Perhaps Catledge was closer to retirement than most executives thought.
The only unresolved and pressing matter in the newsroom at this point was what to do about the Washington bureau chief. The 1968 political campaigns were already beginning to accelerate, and Wicker would be very busy with his column and often out of the capital; if there was ever a proper moment for Wicker to relinquish the bureau to another man with more time for administrative details, that moment was now. But, as in the past, there appeared to be no acceptable replacement for him. Daniel and most other New York executives, though not Rosenthal, were still resistant to Max Frankel, and no one else in Washington seemed qualified. In New York there had been hints dropped in Rosenthal’s direction, but Rosenthal had not been anxious to vacate the executive mainstream for Washington, and Salisbury was probably still too controversial a subject in Washington to be able to function agreeably there. The same might be said of the chief London correspondent, Anthony Lewis, whom the Washington bureaumen remembered unsentimentally. If Lewis were given Wicker’s title, it might result in the resignation of Frankel, among others; Frankel had done very well in covering the White House this year, and regardless of the reservations that Daniel, Catledge, and others had about Frankel’s administrative capacities, they did not wish to lose Frankel’s services as a reporter.
So the situation seemed almost unsolvable. Wicker, who possibly did not even want the job at this point, was stuck with it. He had to hold onto it as one must often seem to cherish an unwanted gift from a very important donor. Reston’s vanity was involved, and Wicker was compelled to respect it until some graceful retreat or alternative could be arranged to Reston’s satisfaction. It was obvious to nearly everyone, however, that Wicker was devoting most of his time and energy to the writing of his column, which had become an excellent addition to The Times’ editorial page. Even the New York editors privately admitted this. Salisbury, in fact, had lately become a fervent fan of Wicker’s writing, admiring the emotion and perception that Wicker regularly displayed in his reports of shifting moods within the capital and the nation.
And yet, strangely, Wicker was the only columnist who was not being featured by The Times in its promotional advertising. Russell Baker, C. L. Sulzberger, and Reston were regularly advertised by The Times, often with their photographs, and The Times did the same for such specialists as Craig Claiborne and Charlotte Curtis, and for its leading cultural critics. At first Wicker thought it was merely an oversight, although he had felt slighted on the very day that he had replaced Krock as a columnist. The Times story that announced Krock’s retirement had rightly recounted at great length the colorful career of the veteran Timesman; it had failed to mention, however, that Wicker was Krock’s successor. When for the next two years Wicker continued to be omitted from the house ads, it appeared that a Southern vendetta had indeed intruded upon the quiet carpets of The Times. Wicker’s pride prevented him from pursuing the matter openly, but within himself he smoldered, and perhaps it was partly this, along with his many other frustrations as the bureau chief, that had driven him more deeply into his column, permitting the bureau to operate largely on its own momentum. He was not the bureau chief by New York’s choice, but despite it, and he had survived primarily because New York had been unable to produce a substitute. It seemed, too, that the impasse might continue indefinitely. Then, suddenly, this situation changed. Wicker learned that New York had selected James Greenfield to replace him.
The idea had been Rosenthal’s, and it had been endorsed gradually by Daniel, Catledge, and finally by Punch Sulzberger. Greenfield had had relatively little to do since the abandonment of plans for an afternoon edition, and Rosenthal was convinced that Greenfield could make a major contribution to the paper as its bureau chief in Washington. Greenfield still had important contacts in the government and on its fringe, people with whom he had worked during his years in the State Department, and he seemed to be in a very advantageous position both from the standpoint of getting the news and distinguishing it from the official obscurantism that government spokesmen so often emit. Rosenthal had long been impressed with Greenfield’s sophistication and flare as a newsman, and, unlike Wicker, Greenfield would do no writing, devoting himself entirely to the running of the bureau. Greenfield’s personality, a smooth blend of amiability and politesse, would also help to win the good will of the bureaumen, Rosenthal thought, overcoming what perhaps no other New York editor could overcome.
So the decision was final, and it was hoped in New York that it could be initiated without delay. But when Reston was informed, he suggested that any personnel changes in Washington be postponed until after the Presidential election. Reston wrote a long memorandum to this effect. When he received no reaction to it, he assumed that his recommendation was being followed in New York. But weeks later, shortly before Punch Sulzberger was scheduled to arrive in Washington to take Reston and Wicker to dinner, Reston learned that Sulzberger was still intent on installing Greenfield in Washington almost immediately. The New York editors saw no reason to wait until after the election, and Sulzberger had sided with them.
When Punch Sulzberger walked into the Washington bureau, on the day of his dinner date with Reston and Wicker, Reston was solemn and distant. Reston could not support the New York plan, and he told Sulzberger that he would not be joining the publisher for dinner; Sulzberger and Wicker should dine alone. Sulzberger was somewhat surprised by Reston’s reaction, although he had sensed in advance the delicacy of the decision; that was why Sulzberger had come to Washington himself to present the plan officially, and had not sent Turner Catledge. Sulzberger also considered Wicker to be a close personal friend, and he thought that at a dinner meeting in Washington there would be less risk of a misunderstanding—it could be handled in the easy informal way that Sulzberger had often discussed business in the past with Wicker and Reston. Wicker had not fallen from grace in Sulzberger’s eyes; instead Wicker would be free to do what he did best, and would be detached from the travail and trivia of office work. Sulzberger had previously been told by the New York editors that Wicker was quite willing, and possibly eager, to step down as the bureau chief, and Sulzberger had proceeded on the assumption that this was true.
But during Sulzberger’s dinner with Wicker, he realized that this was not exactly so. Wicker was tense and obviously upset, agitated by the forces of his loyalty to the bureau, to Reston, to himself. Wicker felt bullied by New York’s determination to replace him quickly with a bureaucrat of their own choosing; and his private suspicion was that Rosenthal, who probably saw Wicker as a future rival for the managing editor’s chair, now wished to eliminate him from the running, simultaneously installing in Washington a less challenging and very indebted ally. Whether or not Wicker would ever be lured by such goals as the managing-editorship was inconsequential to his mood and rationale as he dined with Sulzberger. Wicker felt now that he was being pressed, pushed, and undercut—and he was angry.
After Sulzberger had said what he had come to say, assuring Wicker that Greenfield’s appointment would make life easier for everyone, he flew back to New York on the following morning in his plane, being bumped and jostled during the journey by a storm which he thought he would never survive. After dining with Sulzberger, Wicker spent an uneasy evening, staying up all night in a fuming state of frustration and bitterness.
The next day Wicker telephoned Sulzberger and said that he was about to announce to the staff his resignation as bureau chief, but Sulzberger pleaded with him to delay it. There were other details that had to be completed first, Sulzberger said, adding that he had not yet had time to inform Anthony Lewis in London or Max Frankel. Wicker, aware of how quickly gossip travels in Washington and wishing to spare himself further humiliation, had hoped that his own announcement in Washington might imply that he had perhaps initiated the decision, or at least had been an agreeable part of it—he did not want it to appear to have been an ignominious, unconditional surrender to the editors in New York. But Sulzberger continued to urge that Wicker do nothing, and Wicker complied, although his discomfort was perceived and understood by his friends in the bureau, and soon Max Frankel and others were sharing Wicker’s despair and were contemplating their own resignations.
James Greenfield was unsatisfactory to them not only because he was a New York appointee and his presence in the bureau would be an affront to Wicker and Reston, but because they truly considered him unqualified. He had been a Timesman for only seven months, and before joining the paper, he had worked as an airline executive, a position obtained through his friendship with Pierre Salinger. He was seen by the bureau as a “Bobby Kennedy man,” and it was felt that his political loyalties would, if he were put in charge of the bureau, cast doubt upon The Times’ entire political coverage of Washington. They also recalled incidents in which Greenfield, working in the office of Undersecretary of State George W. Ball, had been less than candid with the press, and it was alleged that he had once tried to suppress information from a Times correspondent in the Congo and had then favored a reporter from Time-Life (Greenfield’s former place of employment) on the same Congo assignment. A few bureaumen were opposed to Greenfield because they considered him a bit too suave, a name-dropper, an individual who seemed to be inordinately infatuated with the glamorous side of government life, what little there was of it. In short, they considered him unfit to represent The Times as its bureau chief in Washington.
And yet, despite this, his appointment was said to be imminent—and the word quickly spread through Washington. It circulated through the press corps and was discussed on the telephone by the disenchanted wives of Timesmen. Tom Wicker’s wife, Neva, thought that the treatment of her husband was disgraceful, and she expressed her feelings in a telephone talk with Reston and in a later one from Carol Sulzberger. Through all this internal clamor the Washington bureau continued its task of covering the news without interruption; but there was an eerie aspect to the reporting, a strange similarity between the pressures being put on the bureau and the front-page stories that the bureau was writing during this first week of February, 1968: South Vietnam had just been unexpectedly assaulted—the Vietcong had attacked twenty-six of the forty-four province capitals in South Vietnam, determined to overthrow, according to Hanoi radio, the “puppet” government and its American allies. Washington was shocked by the news, and Tom Wicker, reporting the reaction at the State Department, Capitol Hill, and the Pentagon, quoted senators who described the reports as “embarrassing” and “humiliating.” But Max Frankel reported that the White House remained confident and resolute, with President Johnson vowing that “the enemy will fail again and again” because “we Americans will never yield.” James Reston, as bewildered as most people were in Washington about the Vietcong offensive, devoted his column to speculating on Hanoi’s strategy of terror; but days later—as the allies had counterattacked, sending jets streaking low over Saigon, Hué, and other cities in South Vietnam, tearing down what the allies had undertaken to defend—Reston’s column pondered the dilemma of the allied decision, asking: “What is the end that justifies this slaughter? How will we save Vietnam if we destroy it in the battle?”
This question was not unlike one that Reston had been asking himself with regard to the editors in New York. Should he stage a counterattack that might block Greenfield’s takeover but might also shake the entire Times hierarchy, causing a scandal that would damage the paper’s image in the eyes of the public? Or should Reston accept the higher decision in the interest of corporate peace and harmony?
Reston waited for a few days; then he left for New York.
In the newsroom, James Greenfield had already accepted congratulations from some reporters who had heard about his appointment to Washington. At first Greenfield was reluctant to comment. The official announcement had yet to be released from Sulzberger’s office, although Greenfield had heard that it was already written, and it was these few days’ delay that had somewhat worried him. When he had revealed his doubts to Rosenthal, he was quickly reassured that there was no need to be concerned—the decision was final, the publisher had endorsed it, Greenfield would become the new chief of the Washington bureau.
Greenfield felt better, but he was still reluctant to talk about it at any length to those who questioned him in the newsroom, and he was amazed when the word spread quickly and he wondered why people seemed so interested—not only newsmen, but government people in Washington had asked their journalist friends about his appointment, right in the middle of the bad news from Vietnam, and Greenfield had just received a call from a young lady who worked for the “Press” section of Newsweek.
“We have information that you’re to be the new bureau chief,” she began, and Greenfield, laughing softly, replied, “Oh, news really gets around,” adding: “Did you hear about it in New York?”
“No,” she said, “from an excellent source in Washington.”
“Well,” he said, “I’m in the middle of the foreign desk right now, and there are people around here who don’t know about it, and I can’t talk very well here …”
“Well,” she said, “can you tell me whether or not it’s true?”
“Yes,” he said, “it’s true.”
“When will it be announced?”
“Friday, I think,” he said, meaning Friday, February 9.
“I heard it would be announced on Thursday.”
“Oh,” he said, “well, maybe your sources are better than mine.”
The Newsweek reporter said that she would call him at noon on Thursday to arrange for an interview, and James Greenfield said that that would be fine.
On the fourteenth floor of the Times building ticks an old grandfather clock that had belonged to Ochs, and a bronze bust of Ochs stares across the wide corridor that one enters upon leaving the elevator. The ceilings are high, the dark wood is polished, and hanging from the walls are portraits of former homes of The Times and executives long dead. The receptionist is male, polite, soft-spoken; an individual with a long plain face and reddish hair who seems large and tall enough to redirect angry visitors from the street who occasionally intrude to complain about the state of the world, or about one of John Oakes’s editorial indiscretions against some distant sultan. But otherwise the atmosphere on the fourteenth floor is very calm and orderly, and the executives’ offices beyond the corridor are large, well-spaced, and quiet.
In the eastern wing, to the left from the elevators, are the offices of Harding Bancroft and Lester Markel; and beyond, the rarely occupied office of Arthur Hays Sulzberger. The seventy-seven-year-old chairman of the board, confined to a wheelchair, usually spends his days in his Fifth Avenue apartment that overlooks the reservoir: there he lives with his wife, his servants, and a pretty young nurse who attends to his needs, and with two frisky papillons that please him as they jump around and sometimes infuriate him when they bite into his favorite pieces of furniture, causing him to bang his cane. But he would never part with them: one of the things that he most remembers about his childhood was that he had not been permitted to have dogs.
In the other section of the fourteenth floor are the offices of the younger top executives—that of Andrew Fisher, who sits behind a modern curve-shaped desk; and at the end of the corridor is the office of the publisher, an elegant suite that is filled with antiques and rather resembles the parlor of the elder Sulzbergers’ home—although, when Punch Sulzberger is present, he seems to dominate the large office with his informality. He often sits in his shirt sleeves behind the not very large antique table that serves as his desk, and he seems constantly in motion as he leans, reaches, stretches across the table toward the buttoned boxes and telephones that connect him with his business advisers, his editors, his pilot, or his secretaries across the corridor. The bookshelves around him are stocked with leather-bound volumes of enduring interest, but the books that he keeps close at hand concern the latest techniques of running a large corporation—books with such titles as Management Grid and Management and Machiavelli.
There is another office on the fourteenth floor, a comparatively small one, that is occupied by James Reston on those infrequent occasions when he is in town. On this cold, gray day in February, Reston had ostensibly flown up from Washington to attend a session of the Council on Foreign Relations, which meets at its headquarters on East Sixty-eighth Street, but the Council was far from Reston’s thoughts as he sat in his office shortly after his arrival. He did not have an appointment with Punch Sulzberger, but Sulzberger soon learned of his presence, and the publisher proceeded to walk down the corridor in his typically casual way to greet Reston. Sulzberger immediately sensed Reston’s mood, and the cause of his displeasure, but he nevertheless affected a lighthearted attitude, exclaiming to Reston as if surprised: “Boy, you’re really upset by the Greenfield thing, aren’t you?”
Reston’s face told all. His skin was flushed, he seemed despondent, and when Reston spoke, his voice had the hard, distant, almost metallic timbre that characterizes his speech whenever he considers a situation to be very grave. A decision had apparently been reached, Reston said, in which “the younger men’s blood would flow—not the older men’s blood”—and then Reston added, quietly, “I’m with the younger men.”
Sulzberger did not know exactly what this meant. The older men apparently referred to Catledge and Daniel; the younger men were Wicker, Frankel, and others in Washington: but did this mean that Reston, joining the younger bureaumen, intended to ally himself with a mass resignation? Or was Reston merely registering his feelings in a vague but dramatic manner?
Sulzberger did not like being placed in this situation. The publisher of The New York Times employs very high-priced executives to smooth out difficult details in advance, to leave nothing to doubt, and yet here Sulzberger found himself face-to-face with Reston and not knowing what would happen if he insisted that Greenfield be sent to Washington. As he stood there, watching Reston, and as the two men later moved into Sulzberger’s suite, it seemed possible that nothing would happen; or perhaps half the bureau would quit and join the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times. But Sulzberger was not so much perturbed by Reston as he was by Catledge and Daniel, and also with himself, for he had chosen to become personally involved when he had gone to Washington to speak with Wicker. Still, Sulzberger believed that Catledge and Daniel, the editors with final authority in the newsroom, should have been able to predict Reston’s ultimate move, and they had not, and now Sulzberger, not wanting to trigger the outcome himself at this time, merely listened.
If Greenfield took charge as planned, Reston said, it would have the grinding, disintegrating effect of a buzz saw in Washington, and it would severely damage The Times both from within and from without. While Reston had nothing against Greenfield personally, he nonetheless saw Greenfield as an “outsider,” and he asked Sulzberger to contemplate how it would look in the capital if The Times abruptly moved Greenfield in over the heads of such men as Wicker and Frankel—it would subject The Times to the charge that it did not trust the men that reported the activities of the government to run its own bureau. It would discourage the loyalty that New York sought from the bureaumen, and it would so damage The Times’ reputation that the very best men on other newspapers, and the brightest students in the universities, would not aspire to work for The Times. Reston’s discussion with Sulzberger shifted back and forth in mood and approach—at times he reasoned with Sulzberger, at other times he implored him, and he also dramatized the Greenfield episode as a battle of the generations: the old versus the young, and, as always in Reston’s philosophy, there was the reminder that youth must be served.
When Reston left, Sulzberger found himself confronted by perhaps the most disturbing decision of his career. If he rejected Reston’s appeal, he might lose Reston and those who worshiped Reston; but if he sided with him, then he would be reversing his own decision, and his own word would mean relatively little in the future. Sulzberger planned to spend the rest of the day and the evening thinking about it. Reston would be spending the night in a New York hotel, and they would meet again on the following day. Sulzberger had time to consult with a few executives who worked outside the News department—Harding Bancroft and such vice-presidents as Ivan Veit, whom he sometimes regarded as the publisher’s confessor. And Sulzberger would consult, too, with his family—his wife, Carol; his sisters, Ruth, Marion, and Judith; and, of course, his mother, Iphigene.
Tom Wicker at this time was in New Hampshire writing about the forthcoming Presidential primary: Richard Nixon had just announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination and Robert Kennedy was yet unwilling to compete against President Johnson. Finishing his work in New Hampshire, Wicker flew to New York hoping to learn more about his own future. He had been very depressed since his dinner meeting with Sulzberger the week before, and Wicker had become embittered days later on hearing it rumored in Washington that he had been forced out as the bureau chief. If Sulzberger had not discouraged him from announcing his own resignation immediately after the decision had been made in New York, he would have been able to yield his position with a bit of grace and dignity; and from New Hampshire he had telephoned Sulzberger to protest the manner in which the Washington situation was being handled in New York. Sulzberger had listened with understanding, and then had asked Wicker to call Catledge and to repeat the complaint, which Wicker did, getting no great satisfaction. Now, a day later, Wicker was in New York.
It was noon as he arrived; the executives would all be out to lunch, so Wicker decided to get something to eat himself before going to The Times. He walked into the Century Club, which is on Forty-third Street two blocks east of the Times building. He had recently been made a member of the Century, an exclusive men’s club composed of many prominent authors and editors, historians, social critics, and editorialists; this was his first visit, and he felt awkward and very much alone as he entered.
In the lobby he was greeted by a porter-polite Negro wearing a white jacket, and then he ascended marble steps to find himself within oak-paneled rooms with high ceilings, and here and there men sat at tables speaking quietly over their preluncheon drinks, and in the library were other men in large soft leather chairs reading the Wall Street Journal or The New York Times. Wicker ordered one martini, then another, before proceeding to the floor above, where he discovered the dining area—a long communal table in one room with small tables nearby; and in other rooms were other tables occupied by quiet-spoken men forsworn to avoid all talk of business.
He felt the soft warm waves of martinis flowing within him as he ordered lunch, sitting at a table opposite an ancient little man who appeared to be ninety years old and who explained that he had once edited a magazine. While Wicker conversed hazily with the old gentleman, his gaze drifted around the room, and the rooms beyond—all the tables were occupied by strangers, with one exception. At one table, seated across from Eliot Fremont-Smith, was Harrison Salisbury.
Salisbury was a member of the Century, as were several ranking Timesmen, among them John Oakes, Clifton Daniel, and James Reston. Wicker was unaware of it during lunch but Reston was then also in the club, seated behind a partition with a former colleague from the Washington bureau, John Pomfret, presently a Times executive in labor relations.
When Reston and Pomfret stood to leave, they saw Wicker. They both seemed surprised and delighted to find him there, and the three Timesmen soon became engaged in rather intense conversation. Salisbury watched them from across the room. His suspicion was aroused, but he did not reveal this to Fremont-Smith. Salisbury had wondered if the Greenfield appointment was going according to plan, but he had not asked Daniel or Rosenthal about this during the past week. He had, in fact, avoided any direct involvement, not consciously but instinctively, with the plan to transfer Greenfield to Washington, for there seemed something not quite propitious about it, although Salisbury himself could find no hard facts to support his notion. His feeling was the result of his keen awareness of office vibrations, and that his instinct was justified seemed to be supported by the few days’ delay in the announcement of Greenfield’s appointment. Now, seeing Reston, Wicker, and Pomfret with their heads together in the Century’s dining room, Salisbury’s fine Kremlinologist’s mind was whirling.
He left the club and walked back to the Times building. In the newsroom, the editors’ expressions seemed unchanged—Daniel and Rosenthal seemed composed, and Greenfield appeared to be untroubled as he stood speaking to a copyreader. At 4 p.m., Salisbury walked with the other editors into Daniel’s office for the daily conference. Daniel presided as usual, and around him sat Rosenthal, Bernstein, Topping, and the others. Behind Daniel, dressed in a blue pinstriped suit, seated comfortably with his legs crossed, gently jiggling a polished black shoe, was Turner Catledge. If Reston and Wicker had been in the newsroom, they would undoubtedly have been invited into the conference; but neither man had been seen on the third floor, and Salisbury was perhaps the only Timesman in the room who knew that they were both now in New York.
The news on this Wednesday afternoon, February 7, was no better nor worse than it had been for several days—the war continued to go badly in Vietnam: Soviet-made tanks were spearheading the North Vietnamese assault west of Khesanh, and Vietcong forces were infiltrating Saigon. The Johnson administration was still unable to induce the North Koreans to return the captured Pueblo with her eighty-two surviving crew members. In New Hampshire, Theodore Sorensen, acting in behalf of Kennedy, was reportedly trying to discourage any political movement to lure Kennedy into a primary fight with President Johnson. Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, the chief Democratic spokesman against the Vietnam war, was entered in the New Hampshire primary and was being applauded on The Times’ editorial page, which had also condemned Robert Kennedy earlier in the week for neither supporting McCarthy nor opposing Johnson.…
The conference had progressed in its normal manner for about twenty minutes when a secretary entered the room with a message for Catledge. Catledge left the room. It was not unusual for Catledge to be called out to receive calls from the publisher’s office, or from very important individuals from the outside; but when Catledge returned to his seat five minutes later, Salisbury detected a mild change in Catledge’s expression. It was not that Catledge had lost some of his composure; it was rather that he seemed too composed, too casual, suggesting the look of a man trying desperately to conceal his inner thoughts. When the conference was over, the editors began to file out but Catledge remained, and asked that Rosenthal also remain; Catledge had something that he wished to discuss with Rosenthal and Daniel. As Salisbury left the room he was fairly certain that James Greenfield would not be going to Washington.
“Gentlemen,” Catledge said to Daniel and Rosenthal, after the others had left, “I have bad news. The publisher has reversed his decision.…”
Daniel’s white face paled even more, and he swallowed hard. Rosenthal reddened. Both were momentarily stunned. Then Rosenthal shouted angrily, “I’m calling Punch!”
“Don’t,” Catledge said, softly, thinking that it would do no good.
“I’m sorry, Turner, but I have to!” Rosenthal replied, beyond control, walking quickly out of the room and grabbing a telephone at his own desk in the newsroom. But the publisher was unreachable: he was in conference, the secretary said, he could not be disturbed. Rosenthal hung up and turned back toward Catledge and Daniel. Both men were standing motionless in the middle of the big office, as silent and still as the photographs on the wall, two wax figures in a museum, the impact of Sulzberger’s decision mounting in their minds. It was humiliating and unforgivable. It was unbelievable. They had been betrayed by the publisher, and now they did not know what to do. Were they expected to resign? Should they resign? If they remained, what power did they have? After decades of fidelity to The Times, after years of climbing the executive ladder and finally getting to the top, what did it mean? What was the point of being the executive editor or the managing editor if one could not replace the bureau chief in Washington?
It was all too disturbing to contemplate at this moment in Daniel’s office, where only one thing was clear—Reston had won. What Reston had won was debatable, but he had undeniably won: New York had again failed in its attempt to control Washington. Sulzberger had permitted Catledge, Daniel, and Rosenthal to go out on a limb, and then Sulzberger had chopped them down. The big question was why? Even Catledge did not know the answer. The obvious guess was that Reston had somehow alarmed the publisher and alerted him to the fact that, particularly now, with the upcoming election, The Times needed a strong Washington bureau at its best, with the top reporters in high morale. There had been enough dissension on The Times within the last few years, and Sulzberger had perhaps felt that it was better at this point to let Reston have his way, although Catledge wondered what Sulzberger’s reversal presaged for Daniel and Rosenthal. Catledge was near the end of the line—he had already told Sulzberger that he was contemplating his retirement—but Daniel and Rosenthal would have to deal now, and in the future, with a Reston whose influence with the publisher was clearly formidable. Whether Sulzberger’s acquiescence represented solely his own change of mind, or whether the women of the family had played a decisive role, namely Iphigene with her fondness for Reston, was something to ponder at another time: now the important fact was that Reston had won, Wicker had survived, and Greenfield would not be going to Washington. And Greenfield did not yet know this. When this dawned on those standing in the office, Clifton Daniel volunteered to call Greenfield in and break the news, but Rosenthal insisted that he be the one to do it in another place. Greenfield was Rosenthal’s friend, had come to the paper primarily because of Rosenthal; Catledge agreed, and Rosenthal walked out to the newsroom, where Greenfield was smiling, accepting congratulations from members of the staff.
Rosenthal got Greenfield’s attention and led him out of the newsroom into the third-floor lobby, then into one of two very small rooms near the receptionist’s desk. These are windowless rooms, barely wider than a confessional, with tall ceilings and small chairs and a single desk no larger than a chess table. The rooms are sometimes used by subordinate editors when interviewing job applicants who are not quite ready for the rites within; or they are used by reporters when interviewing some of the wide-eyed people who arrive at The Times, unannounced, with incredible tales that are never fit to print; or they are used by staff members who do not have private offices and wish to speak confidentially. Rosenthal closed the door behind Greenfield, and the two men sat down. Then Rosenthal told him what had happened, and as he did he seemed about to cry.
Greenfield remembered his premonition, his own fear that it somehow would not work out. Even so, he was now shocked. If only Reston had been more explicit in advance, more demonstrably opposed to Wicker’s removal, Greenfield thought, then this incredible office blunder could have been avoided. If Reston had merely dropped a hint to George Ball, Greenfield thought aloud, Greenfield would have been forewarned and he would have refused to go to Washington. Greenfield had not sought the bureau job; when he had joined The Times he had been promised an important position, but nothing had been specified, and Greenfield had not been particularly eager about returning to Washington, and certainly would not have gone if he had known that Reston was unalterably opposed. But Reston had been vague; and New York had perhaps not really wanted to know Reston’s true feelings on the issue, and had therefore skirted it—but now there had been a headon collision, and there was no saving face in New York. Greenfield could see on Rosenthal’s face the depth of his demoralization, and Greenfield was also overwhelmed with embarrassment.
“Abe,” Greenfield said, finally, “do me a favor.”
Rosenthal nodded.
“Abe, don’t ever ask me to come into this place again.”
Rosenthal understood, and Greenfield resigned on the spot.
Greenfield returned to the newsroom to get his things. It was shortly before 5 p.m., the busiest hour of the working day—the room was crowded with reporters, deskmen, clerks; other staffmen were returning to their desks after a coffee break in the cafeteria, or were returning more hurriedly from outside assignments.
One reporter saw Greenfield putting on his coat, and called, “Hey, Jim, is it true you’re going to Washington?”
Greenfield turned and tried to smile, but he could not.
“It was true,” he replied, softly, “until a few minutes ago. But there was flack from Washington, and so I’m leaving. And I’m not coming back.…”
The reporter, sensing Greenfield’s anxiety, did not detain him with more questions. He shook hands with Greenfield and watched him leave, and then the word quickly began to spread throughout the newsroom. One reporter tried to telephone a colleague in the Washington bureau for more details, but all the lines between New York and the bureau were busy. Then a clerk from one of the copydesks came back with the confirmed report—yes, he said, it was all true, Greenfield had just resigned; Reston had gotten Sulzberger to back down; Reston, Wicker, and Frankel had been spotted in the building earlier, presumably with their resignations ready.
Within a few hours it was on the early-evening radio and television news:
NBC News in Washington reports that rumors spread through government circles today that former Deputy Secretary of State for Public Information James Greenfield was to be named chief of the Washington bureau of The New York Times … [but] Greenfield resigned his job as an assistant metropolitan editor at The Times today, according to Times managing editor Clifton Daniel. Daniel denied that a change had been contemplated in The Times Washington bureau.… Greenfield was not available for comment.…
Rosenthal sat at his desk with his eyes fixed on papers that he was not reading. He was aware of the talk in the room, the reporters circled around their desks. There was laughter among some of them when one reporter arrived and said, in a loud voice, “Hey, did you hear the latest?—the Washington boys just took over WQXR!” Rosenthal could not hear the jokes or comments, but he suspected the worst from a few reporters, those who had been against him since he had begun as an editor years before, and now they were no doubt repeating their old accusations—he was pushing too hard, too fast, and it was bound to catch up with him. As Rosenthal sat, he felt both an inner torture and an outward exposure to the rawness of ridicule—unlike Catledge and Daniel, who were now sheltered within their own offices, Rosenthal had no place to go but back to his desk in the newsroom, in full view of hundreds of staffmen. He felt that he was in a vast gray courtroom being judged simultaneously by several juries, being cross-examined, doubted, speculated upon, scorned; he felt as he had never felt before, the whole tide had abruptly shifted, everything was out of balance, the room had lost its perspective, the New York editorships seemed shattered. His goals destroyed, Rosenthal wondered where he stood. If Catledge had lost his influence with Sulzberger, if Reston was now the publisher’s most trusted adviser, then Daniel and Rosenthal could be in a very awkward position: the line of succession might be shifted from New York to Washington, away from Daniel-Rosenthal to Wicker-Frankel or other Reston followers. Daniel would never succeed Catledge, Rosenthal might never become the managing editor. Since Rosenthal could not speak with Sulzberger, he had no idea whether he should leave or remain, and Catledge and Daniel were no doubt equally bewildered. Rosenthal did not want to stand up and walk to his locker to get his coat, a move requiring that he pass the reporters’ desks and possibly look into their faces. Perhaps one of them would ask him a question, and he might reveal what he truly felt. Rosenthal could not hide his feelings as Daniel and Catledge could; he was transparent, incredibly honest—when he was happy, it glowed through every particle of his face; when he was miserable, his face floundered with despair or erupted with emotion. Now he felt gloom, guilt—his friend Greenfield had been an innocent victim of this mess, and he did not know what he could do to partially make amends. He would talk with Greenfield tonight. Rosenthal’s closest friend, Arthur Gelb, was vacationing in the Caribbean, and there was no one in the newsroom at this time to whom he could turn, or would wish to turn. The other editors in the room had left, or were about to leave; only the bullpen editors seemed preoccupied with putting out the paper—a ninety-six-page edition dated Friday, February 9, 1968, All the News That’s Fit to Print: Vol. CXVII. No. 40, 193 … 10 Cents … 56 Marines Die in Battles in Tense Northern Sector … War-Ending Victory Seen As Aim of Enemy’s Drive … Kennedy Asserts U.S. Cannot Win … Rosenthal read through some of the cables and the carbons of local stories on his desk, but it was difficult to concentrate fully, and he imagined that the same was true of Catledge and Daniel. The great machinery of The Times was grinding out another edition, was moving ahead without them, was moving as great ships often move through the night with senior officers drifting in slumber—we are three men sitting behind our desks in a state of confusion, Rosenthal thought, his reporter’s eye retaining some detachment; we are in a state of mourning, like the old Hebrews. We are sitting shivah.
The telephone rang on Rosenthal’s desk. It was Reston calling from upstairs. He wanted to get together with Rosenthal and Wicker, at Wicker’s suggestion, and Rosenthal proposed that they meet during the early evening at his apartment on Central Park West in the Eighties. It was a very spacious apartment with thick walls where they could have privacy; Rosenthal’s wife was not feeling well but he would send out for Chinese food and perhaps it would be beneficial to bring their differences out into the open at once, before a hardness had set in.
But after Reston and Wicker had arrived, and after drinks had been served, it was obvious that this meeting was too charged with emotion and fury to serve any useful purpose. Reston had wanted Rosenthal to explain himself, and Rosenthal said exactly what was on his mind. He charged that Reston, who was presumably dedicated to preserving the paper’s image, had now helped to tarnish that image, adding that while Reston himself would not give up his writing to edit the paper, Reston would not refrain from interfering with those who had devoted their energies solely to editing. Wicker, Rosenthal continued, was not equipped to write a column and run the bureau, and then Rosenthal, his voice rising, demanded to know why Wicker did not give up the bureau. Wicker objected to Rosenthal’s tone and presumption, and he suspected Rosenthal of excessive ambition. Wicker had no designs on the managing editor’s office, and had even implied as much in a note he had sent to Rosenthal the year before, pledging that he would do all that he could to help Rosenthal achieve his ambition. But now Rosenthal had gone too far, and Wicker was tired of being the political football between New York and Washington. After a few more caustic exchanges, Wicker got up and left the apartment.
Reston remained until the early hours of the morning. During this time he and Rosenthal came to know one another better than they had before, which was not to say that the experience was one of harmony or satisfaction. Each man argued from his own position, believing it to be in the best interest of The Times, and Reston resented Rosenthal’s treatment of Wicker, and he also thought that Rosenthal had been impetuous during the whole Greenfield episode. Rosenthal felt now that he was on trial with Reston, and he resented being put in so defensive a position, and the situation was far from resolved as Reston stood up to leave in the middle of the night. After he did leave, Rosenthal paced through the apartment in a state of anguished monologue; and, at daybreak, unable to resist, he telephoned Reston’s hotel, woke him up, and continued the tense discussion. It was an outrageous thing to do, and Rosenthal regretted doing it, but it was somehow consistent with the bizarre events that had gripped the upper echelon of The Times during the last several hours—it had been a total nightmare for Rosenthal, an executive theater of the absurd.
When he arrived at The Times later in the morning, exhausted yet invigorated by the turmoil of the past twenty-four hours, Rosenthal went directly up to the fourteenth floor to keep an appointment he had with Sulzberger. The publisher was expecting him, and when Rosenthal had emerged from the elevator he saw Sulzberger coming toward him down the corridor with his arms outstretched; and then, in the spirit of men who had shared a sadness, they embraced and walked together into Sulzberger’s office.
If Rosenthal had had any serious doubts about his place on the paper, Sulzberger quickly dispelled them. Sulzberger was personally relying on him, he said, to help repair the damage done and to restore to The Times the harmony that had once prevailed. They had learned a good deal about The Times and about themselves during this experience, and Sulzberger thought that perhaps some good would come of it. The discord had at least been played out to the hilt, it had hit deep and low, and now there was nowhere to go but up. Sulzberger asked Rosenthal to spend the weekend at his country home for further discussions, and Rosenthal felt better. Returning to the newsroom, Rosenthal informed Daniel and Catledge of his weekend plans; he hoped that they also would attempt to reach an understanding with the publisher.
The next day, on page three of the Washington Post, under a headline that read: “A New York Times Coup That Was Almost Fit To Print,” was the story. It reported the details of James Greenfield’s departure and mentioned that there had been cheering in the Washington bureau after the announcement, with one bureauman having exclaimed: “We’ve won.”
Rosenthal resented the story, as did most Times editors, including Reston and Wicker. There is a tacit understanding among most responsible newspapers that they not expose one another’s internal difficulties—The Times, after all, had not focused on the Post’s executive machinations in past years—but the Post on this occasion had obviously not played by the rules, even though Reston had spoken on the telephone during the previous afternoon with his friend Katharine Graham, the president of the Post, and with her editor Benjamin Bradlee. But it had not suppressed the story, and now on the morning of February 9 it was in print, and The Times’ editors suddenly had a fuller understanding of the meaning of the freedom of the press, and they knew, possibly for the first time, what it is like to be on the receiving end of reporting when the news is not favorable.
Despite the peace that Rosenthal had made with the publisher, the older editors still felt betrayed, and they ignored Sulzberger for several days. Catledge finally agreed to Sulzberger’s earnest request that their years of friendship not be destroyed by this single incident, but Daniel continued to snub Sulzberger for almost two weeks; and when he finally did speak freely with him, late one day after the news conference, in the small room adjacent to his office, Daniel lost his composure and, in a shrill voice, lectured the publisher like a schoolboy. After that, it seemed unlikely that things could ever be entirely reconciled between Clifton Daniel and Punch Sulzberger.
The Times continued to publish as usual during the weeks ahead, although there were days when Catledge and Daniel seemed listless and utterly dejected. The embarrassing aspects of the Greenfield affair had received national exposure through such publications as Time and Newsweek, and there were rumors in the newsroom that Daniel was looking for another job and that Catledge was merely marking time until his retirement. But as disjointed as the executive situation was within the paper, the events of the outside world were worse, and this tended initially to have an almost positive effect on the editors—they were forced to submerge their own differences somewhat to concentrate on the sudden chaos in the nation. There was such flagrant disunity within the United States that Lyndon B. Johnson was driven to admit, on March 31, that he could not unify the country, and thus would not seek renomination for the Presidency.
The Vietnamese war continued to be a hopeless struggle, draining both the economy and the patience of citizens young and old, creating factions shile common trait seemed only to be hate and violence. In April, Martin Luther King was fatally shot by a sniper in Memphis, setting off riots in Chicago and Washington. In June, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, where his bid for the Democratic nomination, begun three months before, had just peaked with his victory in the California primary. Between the two deaths, there had been clashes across the land between peace marchers and the police, with white racists calling for “law and order” and Negro racists calling for “black power”; and on the Columbia University campus in New York, in the most dramatic student protest of the year, five buildings were seized, classes were suspended, 720 demonstrators were arraigned, and the president of the university would resign during the summer. The Columbia protest had begun in April as students attempted to force the university to sever its ties with the Institute for Defense Analyses, a twelve-university consortium that performed military research for the government, and also to halt the construction of a nine-story gymnasium in Morningside Park that would form a kind of buffer between Harlem and the Columbia community—“gym crow” was the protest term for it.
But these issues were linked to larger breaches between students and administrators, were part of what was popularly being referred to as a worldwide “generation gap.” Now there were student boycotts in Poland, organized protests in Czechoslovakia, surges of youthful idealism throughout Europe and Asia—while old men rushed to buy gold, seeking security and solidity against the unsteady standards of the Sixties. In America the large corporations, computerized, profit-minded, were producing new cars that were grated with flaws and worthless luxuries for a nation that had the best and worst of everything. As the corporations continued to make millions, young men died in Vietnam, and older young men like Punch Sulzberger seemed caught between the prismatic vision of the generation above and the one below. At forty-two, Sulzberger felt what other heads of institutions were now feeling: it was as if they had all been tuned into the same channel and were now all being jammed by the same static. On every level, authority was being challenged by the pressures for change, the prod of publicized protest; young people, though powerless themselves, had gained a fleeting influence through some mysterious combination of electronics and histrionics in a synthetic age—Mark Rudd, Danny the Red, Rap Brown; discothèque radicals and guitar-strumming nuns were the creations of a climate that had turned the heat on Johnson and de Gaulle, on the international banker, the neighborhood schoolteacher, the cop on the beat. Even such a fundamentalist institution as the Roman Catholic Church was being forced into making concessions, being questioned about what had once been unquestioned.
Shortly after the riots had paralyzed Columbia, the demonstrators turned their attention toward what they considered another bastion of the enemy—The New York Times. The Sulzberger family, products of Columbia education, had long been influential in the university’s activities—like his father before him, Punch Sulzberger was a trustee of Columbia, and he had supported the Columbia policies (including its military research ties with the government) that the students now found morally reprehensible. On May 2, eighty-two young people assembled outside Punch Sulzberger’s home at 1010 Fifth Avenue, demonstrated for forty-five minutes, and chanted: “New York Times—print the truth!” They charged that The Times’ reporting of the Columbia protest had sided with the administration and had shown little understanding of the students’ position, and they also questioned the ethics of a Times publisher who served as a trustee of a university that was regularly in his newspaper’s headlines. They saw this as a conflict of interest, but Sulzberger denied the charge in a statement printed in the next morning’s Times, adding: “We do not believe that executives of a newspaper need divorce themselves from some service to the community.” While he admitted that the editorials—which had condemned the campus disorder under such titles as “Hoodlumism at Columbia”—had reflected his opinion, he insisted that the reporting had been objective. The Times, he said, “had used its resources to provide full, accurate and dispassionate coverage.” But the students and their supporters disagreed. The reporting, they believed, had been neither fair nor dispassionate, and they were particularly incensed by one story that had appeared on page one of The Times on May 1. It was a compassionate article that featured the president of Columbia University, Grayson Kirk. It described him as he stood in his large office that had been invaded by demonstrators—furniture was broken; the floor was littered with tin cans, half-eaten sandwiches, and dirty blankets—and Dr. Kirk, passing a hand over his face, was quoted as saying, “My God, how could human beings do a thing like this?” The story had been written by A. M. Rosenthal.
Rosenthal had given himself the assignment, appearing on the Columbia campus one evening, in response to an inner urge to experience again the fulfillment that he had felt as a reporter. He saw the Columbia story as a very tragic but significant event: a proud old institution of learning was being ravaged by young men that it was endowed to assist, and he wanted to know what had gone wrong, and why. But when he had informed Clifton Daniel of his plan to write about Columbia, the managing editor had objected. It had been understood that Rosenthal, on being made an editor, would retire from reporting, adhering to the policy and practice of both Catledge and Daniel. And until this time Rosenthal had complied. But now the power of authority had temporarily been weakened within the newsroom as elsewhere, and Rosenthal’s more independent attitude was also possibly influenced by the recent triumph of Reston, who had never taken the vow of obscurity when he had become an editor and who had proven to be the most formidable man on the staff. When Rosenthal insisted that he wanted to write about Columbia, Daniel withdrew his objection. Daniel’s eighty-three-year-old father had just died after a long illness, and he went immediately to Zebulon to be with his mother. Rosenthal was left in charge of the newsroom, free to do as he saw fit, and it was then that he wrote the story that described Columbia’s tormented president, Grayson Kirk, walking in his disheveled office after having listened for hours to the sounds of police sirens, the smashing of glass, the students’ chants of “Kirk must go”:
He wandered about the room. It was almost empty of furniture.… He was still neat and dapper but his face was gray and he seemed to move and walk in a trance. So did almost everybody in the room. A policeman picked up a book on the floor and said: “The whole world is in these books; how could they do this to these books?” …
Dr. David Truman, vice president of the university, was there, too, exhaustion on his face. He wandered through the suite, back and forth from wrecked room to wrecked room and at one point he said, almost to himself, “Do you think they will know why we had to do this, to call in the police? Will they know what we went through before we decided?”
A police inspector strolled over to Dr. Kirk and silently showed him something he had just picked up from the floor that a student had left behind—a piece of iron pipe tied to a bit of rope.…
The publication of Rosenthal’s story enraged dozens of readers who saw Dr. Kirk as a villain of the uprising, a reactionary administrator whose ineptitude had fomented the discord, and whose tolerance of the university’s involvement with government military research projects was an affront to the integrity of Columbia. Several angry letters were sent to The Times, and in the Village Voice there were articles by Nat Hentoff and Jack Newfield that criticized both Rosenthal’s article and the paper’s broader coverage. The Times was portrayed as a monstrous organ of the Establishment that, in attempting to whitewash its sister institution on Morningside Heights, had arranged the facts and conveyed a tone in much of its reporting that vilified the student demonstrators and had not given equal prominence to the causes of their dissatisfaction or to the brutality of the police. (Almost one hundred young people were reportedly injured in scuffles with the police, including a Times reporter whose head wound—from handcuffs being used as brass knuckles—required twelve stitches.)
Rosenthal was upset by the negative reaction to his article, and while he attributed much of it to critics from the New Left who would go to any length to fault The Times, he nevertheless wondered what had suddenly gone wrong within his life. After a prolonged period of success, recognition, and reward, it now seemed that everything he touched was ill-fated: the book that he had coauthored with Gelb had been condemned by the critics; the afternoon edition that he had edited had been discarded by Sulzberger; the attempt to place Greenfield in Washington had boomeranged; and now the first news article that he had written in years had become a cause célèbre. He did not know what he had done, or had not done, to deserve such reversals, but he was fairly certain of one thing—1968 was the worst year of his life.
It was also an unpleasant time for Mrs. Arthur Hays Sulzberger. She was soon to be seventy-six, and she had lately become deeply concerned with the future of The Times. In recent years there had been an extraordinary amount of criticism of The Times published in various periodicals and magazines—Commentary and Encounter, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, The Public Interest, among others—much of it concentrated on the paper’s news coverage, some of it centered on the personalities of the men who help to run The Times. Following the publication of these critical articles, Clifton Daniel and his associate editors had carefully reread them to see if they could find any errors of fact or omission so that, should Catledge or a member of the Sulzberger family make inquiry, Daniel would be prepared to reply with a memo that might invalidate the criticism, and might also serve as a basis for a letter of correction to be sent to the offending magazine. Until 1968 Mrs. Sulzberger was convinced, as were nearly all the editors, that there had been little merit in the published criticism. The articles either made factual errors while accusing The Times of the same, or they gave the impression that The Times’ editors were having grave personality differences and were engaged in an internal struggle. Mrs. Sulzberger believed this to be exaggerated, and she said so in one lettter that she wrote to the author of one such magazine piece.
But now in 1968, following the Greenfield incident, she could no longer be so sure. She had also been disturbed recently by some stories that she had read in her own newspaper, stories that emphasized sex and suggested the younger generation’s complete abandonment of the moral strictures of the past. One article that was particularly offensive to her appeared on the women’s page: it described how young college women at New York City universities were living with young men in an atmosphere of sexual emancipation, and one coed who was cited but was not named was a sophomore at Barnard College, Mrs. Sulzberger’s alma mater. The Barnard girl was reported to be living with a Columbia College junior in a $100-a-month apartment within walking distance of classes. The couple had lived together for two years, the article continued, and had once flown to Puerto Rico for an abortion. But now, having abandoned birth control pills, the couple was attempting to have children but was not necessarily ready for marriage, believing it “too serious a step.”
Shortly after the Times article was printed, the Barnard authorities located the girl and sought to expel her because she had disregarded the dormitory regulations and had also lied in the process. But the coed asked for an open hearing, and this prompted student support within the adjoining campuses of Barnard and Columbia: they brandished signs and petitions in front of the Barnard College library, demanding a change in the student housing regulations, and these demonstrations and the debates that followed kept the story alive for months. The Times covered it fully, to Mrs. Sulzberger’s increasing chagrin. It was as if the editors had just discovered sex, she thought, and one day she chided her son: “Why not put sex in perspective?” reminding him, “It went on in my day too.”
But what most bothered her now was the seeming lack of direction that had gripped The Times; it was getting larger, fatter, richer, and yet it appeared to have lost some of its sense of mission. When she pondered this, her mood was not lighthearted and the question that she posed one day to her son was not meant to be answered easily or quickly. “Where,” she asked, “are we going?”
Punch Sulzberger spent the rest of the year trying to reply. His answers were in the form of documents that he composed, regarding them as part of his self-education, and he shared them with no outsiders. He sent the first document to his mother in the winter of 1968, and he continued to work on others throughout the year and into 1969. But within a few months of the Greenfield resignation, Sulzberger decided that an immediate and painful decision had to be made. The executive leadership in the News department had been shattered by the recent Washington-New York confrontation, and Sulzberger felt compelled to replace his old friend and adviser, Turner Catledge. Catledge had been one of the great figures of The Times, had taken over a sprawling mismanaged operation in 1951 and had coordinated it; but now, at the age of sixty-seven, Catledge’s energies were not what they had been, and the scars from the February feud had not healed, and if the situation remained as it was, the morale of the entire staff might continue to deteriorate. Nobody in the newsroom seemed to know who the boss was; even the senior editors did not know which way to turn for a decision. Ochs had had similar problems a half-century ago, Iphigene informed her son, and Ochs had never permitted his personal concerns to impede the progress of the paper. The Times came first, and now Catledge had to be replaced by a man who could reunite the paper, perhaps restoring some of the Ochsian spirit of the past, and there was only one Timesman who could do this. James Reston.
At fifty-eight, Reston had been a Timesman for nearly thirty years, and his stature was such that no other editor—not Daniel, Salisbury, Rosenthal, or Catledge—could question his right to the top job in the newsroom. Furthermore, by bringing Reston to New York, it would remove from Washington the one individual with the power to challenge the New York leadership; it was an ingenious plan that would centralize all the authority in the home office, would eliminate the last of the old dukedoms, and would also represent a triumph of sorts for Washington—their man had gained control of the newsroom, and the directives from New York would henceforth not seem so unsavory in Washington. Punch Sulzberger, his mother, and the rest of the family all agreed that the plan should be instituted as soon as possible, but the publisher, still sensitive to Catledge’s feelings, was hesitant about revealing it at this time. So much had already happened in so short a time, and he would have preferred to wait awhile, although he knew that he should not. He did not want to risk losing Catledge, for he hoped that Catledge would remain as a director of The New York Times Company and a vice-president, devoting himself to the general problems of corporate policy and serving in his natural capacity as a kind of elder statesman and diplomat during the period of transition.
Sulzberger was contemplating this in his office one day in April when his friend Sydney Gruson, who had decided to leave The Times to become an associate publisher of Newsday, walked in for a brief chat. Gruson’s new position at Newsday had already been announced, but he was not scheduled to begin until May, and Sulzberger, who felt very comfortable with Gruson, decided to discuss the Reston plan with him, adding that Reston had been consulted and had agreed to accept it. Gruson conceded that the move was a wise one, perhaps the only one that would accomplish Sulzberger’s aims, although Gruson felt badly for Clifton Daniel. Gruson was one of the few men who had enjoyed a long and warm relationship with the managing editor; the latter had been instrumental in getting Gruson onto The Times in 1944 and had also supported Gruson’s appointment to foreign editor in 1965. Daniel, who had been under Catledge for so long, would now be under Reston, and would never know the feeling of being completely in charge.
Later that day, Gruson was walking through the newsroom and he encountered Daniel, who was leaving his office. Daniel paused for a moment, and then invited Gruson into the office for a drink. After Daniel had fixed the drinks and sat down in the small room, he looked at Gruson and he appeared to be troubled and mildly confused. “Tell me,” Daniel said finally, “what is going on around here?”
Gruson felt compelled to tell Daniel what he knew he should not. Sulzberger had spoken in confidence, and yet Gruson felt a strong sense of loyalty to Daniel, particularly now when things seemed to be uncertain, and so Gruson told Daniel what he had heard. Daniel turned pale and swallowed his drink. Then he stood and relayed the news to Catledge, who consulted with Sulzberger, and thus the elevation of Reston was confirmed.
Gruson was extremely embarrassed by what he had done on this Friday afternoon, and he quickly wrote a note of apology to Reston. On the following Monday, he revisited the publisher’s office, and Sulzberger looked at him and swore in a loud voice, exclaiming, “Sydney, I didn’t think you’d have the nerve to show your face in this place again!” But Sulzberger did not really seem upset. If anything, he seemed relieved; the word was out. He had since spoken at length with Catledge, and the latter would remain with the paper to help during the period ahead. It was possible that Sulzberger, subconsciously, had leaked the word through Gruson to the editors on the third floor. Among Gruson’s many assets and charms, there was also an inability to keep secrets, and Sulzberger knew Gruson well enough to know this. So Gruson had really done Sulzberger a favor, and the publisher’s fondness for Gruson was such that he wished he was not leaving to take the Newsday job. Before Gruson left, the publisher informed the owners of Newsday that he would be making attempts to rehire Gruson; and within a year, he would. Gruson would return in 1969 as Sulzberger’s special assistant.
Reston came to New York as the executive editor in the early summer of 1968, and within a very few months his presence had influenced the daily coverage of the news and had brought a new atmosphere of informality to the newsroom. Reston walked around the room in his shirt sleeves, introducing himself as “Scotty” to those Timesmen that he did not know, and his “office” was a desk in full view of everyone—it was actually Harrison Salisbury’s desk, the latter having moved temporarily into the national-news editor’s chair to replace Claude Sitton, who had resigned in May to become editorial director of the News and Observer Publishing Company in Raleigh, North Carolina. With Reston’s arrival, the seat syndrome and much of the pomp and ritual of the newsroom was passé, and so was the four o’clock conference, which Reston thought was unessential. He did not abolish it, however; in deference to Daniel, who continued to preside at four o’clock, the meetings went on, although Reston himself did not attend, and soon other editors were regularly absent, sending subordinates. Reston held his conference at 11:30 each morning. It was held in Daniel’s office and attended by Daniel and Rosenthal, Salisbury and Topping, Gelb and the new picture editor, John G. Morris, who had worked at Magnum and Time-Life. Daniel occupied his regular chair at the head of the table, but the focus of attention was entirely on Reston no matter where he chose to sit, and Reston’s ease and geniality were pervasive—a stranger would never have guessed that there had recently been animosity and discord among editors at this table.
Reston had not come to New York as a conqueror but rather as a conciliator, and the editors now seemed to recognize the need for a rapprochement—for the good of The Times and their own good as well. With a minimum of effort, Daniel was soon able to work under Reston as he had under Catledge, and Reston himself often visited Catledge’s back office for advice and reassurance on subjects about which Catledge was better informed. Rosenthal and Salisbury seemed cordial, and it was Salisbury who suggested, at a meeting one morning, that Rosenthal write a column for the editorial page in July while Wicker was away on vacation; Reston endorsed the suggestion and Oakes concurred. Rosenthal had made his peace with Reston after their emotional scene following Greenfield’s resignation; Rosenthal had called Reston in Washington a day later, saying that he did not want twenty years of friendship to be eradicated by the outbursts of a single evening, and Reston said that he felt the same way. Rosenthal did not exactly know what his future was under Reston in New York, but he quickly sensed the excitement and change that Reston’s presence was bringing to The Times.
The 11:30 meetings, unlike the 4 p.m. recitals, were vibrant with new ideas and discussions about what should be covered and how. While Reston did not think that The Times should abandon its role as “the paper of record,” he did want to reexamine the old definition of news, to eliminate much of the semiofficial pronouncements and announcements that The Times had habitually honored, and to devote that space to a more reflective appraisal of daily events. Reston had once stated in a speech about journalists: “We are not covering the news of the mind as we should; we minimize the conflict of ideas and emphasize the conflict in the streets”—now he was in a position to change this, and hardly a day passed without The Times’ carrying an interview with an important man of ideas: if it was not Justice Fortas commenting on modern youth and the law, it was Ben Shahn discussing his art, or S. J. Perelman lamenting the state of humor, or Jean Monnet reflecting on economic conditions in Europe. The difference in The Times was not so much the attention given to such individuals as these, who had often been in the headlines before; rather it was the elaborate display that the paper was now giving to what Reston had called “the news of the mind.”
A very long interview with André Malraux, beginning on the first page of the second section, under a prominent headline and photograph, was continued in the back of the paper; in the days when the bullpen had decisive power, Bernstein would doubtless have not allowed such an interview or feature story to jump from that page (known within the office as the second-front) to the back, insisting instead that second-front features be cut to fit entirely on that one page and to end above the index, a policy that discouraged long interviews. And it was no longer uncommon to find interviews with, or speeches by, such distinguished men as C. P. Snow, on page one.
Reston wanted The Times to report what the young people of the nation were thinking and saying, and one of his first instructions was that The Times print excerpts from the remarks being delivered by valedictorians to various graduating classes around the nation in 1968. If the valedictorians seemed no more in agreement on the national goals or solutions than the politicians or educators, it did not matter; Reston’s point was to have “the conflict of ideas” reported as adequately as “the conflict in the streets,” and he also wished to suggest through his newspaper that there was more to America in the Sixties than mere conflict. As a result of his editorship, numbers of stories were soon to appear that described the more tranquil mood of small-town America, the hamlets of central Pennsylvania, the flatlands of the West, and within the quietude of Ohio not far from where Reston had been reared—to such places The Times sent reporters and photographers to portray the silent majority, to record their frustrations and hopes, to ask them which man they preferred as their next President. Most of them, like Reston, were not very enthusiastic about either Hubert H. Humphrey or Richard M. Nixon, and while they were worried about the war in Vietnam, they seemed equally concerned about the rising prices of food, the inabilities of television repairmen, and the violence of the noisy minorities at home. They did not feel, however, that America was as bad as the press made it out to be, and much of this attitude was reechoed in Reston’s own columns, datelined “Washington,” “Prague,” “Moscow,” during the summer and winter of 1968. While America could not boast of “law and order,” this was perhaps all to the good, he suggested, for the alternatives might be totalitarianism, or the sort of suppression that the Soviet Union had just demonstrated in quelling liberal tendencies in Czechoslovakia. Reston wrote several pieces on this theme during the latter half of 1968, reminding readers that the United States, with all its flaws, was infinitely superior to lands overseas where there was “law and order” and little else.
The Nineteen-sixties might indeed prove to have been a glorious time in American history, Reston said in a speech at the University of North Carolina; Americans were not avoiding their problems, as the Soviets were, but instead were struggling with them openly—in the streets, on the campuses, in the courts—and he saw signs of great promise and hope for the new generation of Americans. Reston also found life in New York to be somewhat better than he had expected—the city was a fascinating study of daily recovery after daily turmoil, rhythmic in its discord, and he was enchanted by the everyday sights that most New Yorkers took for granted. From the windows of his skyscraper apartment near the United Nations, he and his wife were enthralled by the movement on the East River below—the endless tandem of tankers and tugs, yachts and submarines, seaplanes and freight-car floats, motorboats carrying commuters to Wall Street, Circle Line cruisers teeming with tourists, scows packed with garbage and being pursued by seagulls—it would make an excellent subject for a story, Reston told Gelb, and Gelb quickly agreed and assigned a reporter to it, and within a few days a two-thousand-word article with photographs was lavishly spread across the second-front of The Times, “jumping” to the back.
As energetic as Reston was, it was soon apparent that he could not both write his thrice-weekly column and have sufficient time left for all the necessary executive chores; and so in November of 1968, in accordance with Punch Sulzberger’s wishes, Reston announced the appointment of Rosenthal to the newly created position of associate managing editor, a title that placed Rosenthal over Bernstein, Salisbury, and Freedman, and invested in him full responsibility and authority for the running of the daily paper. Clifton Daniel, continuing as the managing editor, would be available to Rosenthal for higher consultation, but Daniel would be devoting himself more to relieving Reston of administrative details and to overseeing the non-news side of the daily operation. Daniel would also replace Lester Markel as the moderator of the National Educational Television network’s news show; Markel, who would be seventy-five in January of 1969, was scheduled to retire from The Times and take charge of a project for the Twentieth Century Fund on the relationship between public opinion and public policy. And so, at forty-six, Rosenthal would be serving essentially as an untitled managing editor. He was answerable to Reston, and Daniel would not impose his will over Rosenthal’s news judgment; Rosenthal would also be in a position of authority in the bullpen. When Theodore Bernstein had cited Rosenthal as a potential executive in 1962, and had prompted Catledge to make him the New York editor, Bernstein had no idea that Rosenthal’s rise would be so rapid, would within six years put Rosenthal in a position to overrule the paper’s renowned rule maker, Bernstein himself. But as Reston suggested in his statement while promoting Rosenthal in 1968, the moment had come “to bring along to the executive structure of The Times a new generation.”
At the same time Reston achieved, as only Reston could achieve, a smooth transferal of Wicker from the Washington bureau leadership to the position of associate editor. Wicker, forty-two, would now have his name printed each day on The Times’ masthead on the editorial page, as would Rosenthal, but he would devote himself primarily to the writing of his column. Wicker would be replaced by Max Frankel, thirty-eight, although Frankel’s bureau would be an adjunct of the New York office—the autonomous grandeur that had been created by Krock was now a thing of the past, if Krock himself was not. Remarkably, the eighty-one-year-old Arthur Krock was still a resilient fixture in the bureau; and he had just published a best-selling book, Memoirs, that contained, characteristically, a few barbs for the New York office. Krock charged The Times with “over-organization,” a lack of patriarchal spirit, and excessive power and wealth, among other things, but the executives at The Times accepted the criticism as graciously as they could. They were reluctant to argue with Krock, having learned from experience that they probably could not win, and they also were now hopeful that the old differences would subside and a new era of understanding would begin. It had been a tumultuous year, 1968, but now it was over, endigng on a final note of sadness that brought them together.
On the snowy, freezing Sunday afternoon of December 15, they gathered within a very large, ornate temple to mourn the death of Arthur Hays Sulzberger. He had died peacefully in his sleep three days before, at seventy-seven, living as long as Ochs. The memorial service for the chairman of the board, held at Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street, was attended by many of the nation’s political and business leaders, and cables of condolences had been received from every part of the world. Among the more than one thousand mourners in the temple were New York’s Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, Mayor John V. Lindsay, Senator Jacob K. Javits, and also President-Elect Richard M. Nixon. The appearance of Nixon had been something of a surprise to most Timesmen in attendance, for the paper had not supported him for the Presidency and it had also recently become involved in a grudging dispute with him because of his running mate, Spiro T. Agnew. One month before the election, a Times editorial described Agnew as “utterly inadequate,” and three weeks later John Oakes printed another editorial that dredged up old charges of conflict of interest that had been brought against Agnew prior to his election as the governor of Maryland in 1966. These charges, among others, had centered on Agnew’s involvement in certain land-buying ventures and his affiliation with a bank that did business with the state; while they had made headlines, they had failed to establish evidence of illegality on Agnew’s part, or even impropriety, and in 1966 The Times had endorsed Agnew in his gubernatorial race. But two years later, in an editorial urging the support of the Hubert Humphrey-Edmund Muskie Democratic ticket in the Presidential election, The Times reintroduced the old allegations about Agnew, concluding that “Mr. Agnew has demonstrated that he is not fit to stand one step away from the Presidency.”
Nixon was incensed. In a CBS television interview, he cited it as “the lowest kind of gutter politics that a great newspaper could possibly engage in,” adding, “A retraction will be demanded at The Times legally tomorrow.” But John Oakes, instead of retracting it, reprinted the offensive editorial, thus generating a series of charges and countercharges between the newspaper and the Agnew campaign workers and lawyers. Agnew even took out a full-page ad in The Times to proclaim his innocence and to assert that the paper had made errors of fact yet refused to admit them; the headline of Agnew’s ad read: “The truth hurts at Times.”
But with Nixon’s appearance at the Sulzberger service, it was obvious that the next President of the United States did not wish to continue his dispute with The Times, which had, after Nixon’s election, immediately begun to build its bridges back to the White House. Oakes had published editorials complimenting Nixon on his selection of Professor Henry A. Kissinger of Harvard as a Presidential assistant for national security, and Dr. Lee A. DuBridge as an adviser on science; and the announcement of Nixon’s cabinet–together with the appointment of Daniel Patrick Moynihan to head the Council on Urban Affairs—was also greeted with enthusiasm in The Times—as Nixon himself was greeted when he walked into Temple Emanu-El with his Secret Service men to pay his respects to the Sulzberger family.
Turner Catledge shook Nixon’s hand at the door, and with an arm over the President-Elect’s shoulder, he escorted him up the aisle to a seat in the front not far from where the family was assembled—Iphigene Sulzberger, her son and her three daughters; members of the Adler branch, the Oakeses, and close family friends. In the pews to the right were such leaders as Bruce A. Gimbel, president of Gimbel Brothers, Inc.; Robert W. Sarnoff, president of the Radio Corporation of America; Eugene R. Black, Robert Moses, General Edward S. Greenbaum; David Rockefeller, Laurance S. Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller 3d. The top men of The Times were there: Harding Bancroft and Andrew Fisher, Ivan Veit and Francis Cox; Clifton Daniel and Harrison Salisbury, Theodore Bernstein and Lester Markel and Daniel Schwarz. Among the many former Timesmen in the congregation were Brooks Atkinson, Charles Merz, and Bosley Crowther; and seated near A. M. Rosenthal was an individual who had worked briefly for The Times—James Greenfield.
Greenfield was now a news executive with the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company, having done very well since leaving The Times less than a year ago. He had also maintained close ties with many Timesmen, including Punch Sulzberger, with whom he planned to spend New Year’s Eve. He had also visited with Tom Wicker in Washington shortly after the incident of last February, and there were no hard feelings between them. In October, with the announcement of Jacqueline Kennedy’s plans to marry Aristotle Onassis, Greenfield suddenly received numbers of calls from newspapers and networks seeking help in reaching Kennedy sources, most of whom Greenfield knew personally; among the callers was the Washington bureau of The Times, and Greenfield helped in every way that he could.
The service for Arthur Hays Sulzberger was a simple one, in accordance with the instructions that he had written five years ago for this occasion. He wanted no flowers, no elegant casket, no extravagant display of mourning—and no Mozart, a composer whose music offended Sulzberger’s otherwise tolerant spirit. The service began with the singing of Schubert’s musical arrangement of the Twenty-third Psalm, “The Lord Is My Shepherd.” Then after Rabbi Nathan A. Perilman had recited three psalms, and after the choir had again sung, James Reston appeared in the bright light of the altar and climbed the pulpit that had been donated to the temple many years ago by Adolph Ochs. Reston was to deliver the eulogy, as he had done in 1963 for Dryfoos, and though his voice was solemn it seemed to convey a sense of history and continuity as it echoed through the towering heights of the great hall.
The passing of Sulzberger, Reston said, marked the end of the last member of the seventh generation of a remarkable family that had settled in America in 1695, before the country had gained independence. Sulzberger had inherited from his forebears a deeply serious strain, Reston said, a genuine modesty, a belief in service, and he had no fear of revision. Sulzberger was not a moralizer, Reston continued, but he was mortally afraid of abusing personal power, or the power of the paper; he thought of himself in terms of stewardship rather than of ownership, and he preserved the vanishing gift of actually listening to what other people were saying, and then thinking about it before answering. The result, Reston said, was that men went away from him feeling that they had been heard out to the end and that they were being treated fairly.
“If you have any doubt about the enduring quality of his example and character,” Reston said, looking up from the pulpit, his voice rising slightly, “all you have to do is look around. The new generation of this family is already in place, with another Arthur Sulzberger at its head, and he has carried The Times to even greater successes than ever before; and they are going to have to stepively, for the next generation is already knocking at the door.
“The test of great leadership,” Reston concluded, “is whether it leaves behind a situation which common sense and hard work can deal with successfully. Reverence for the symbol and fearlessness of revision—all that we have and mean to defend—all that and Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, and her children, and their children, who will learn the art in their time.”